Computer Helps in Dissecting Dante

Special to the New York Times

Published: November 27, 1988

HANOVER, N.H.—
American and European scholars huddled over a computer at Dartmouth College to determine how many times the character Francesca appears in ''The Divine Comedy'' and its commentaries.

About a dozen scholars, members of the Dante Society, were being introduced to a computer program to aid their research. The bank, or data base, took six years to compile and can search 600 years of interpretations of the 14th-century work and isolate words and passages. It showed within seconds that Francesca was mentioned 335 times by Dante and 23 times by his most important commentators.

''Without the computer, such a search would take about four days,'' said Albert L. Rossi, a professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth, ''You would have to look through each book of commentary individually if you were lucky enough to have them all in the same room.'' Question of Myrtle and Laurel

Dante scholars often research a single line of ''The Divine Comedy,'' whose 15,000 lines have more than 500 characters. The poem traces the poet's journey through Hell, Heaven and Purgatory. It is considered the first great work in the Italian vernacular, and hundred of line-by-line commentaries have been written for it.

Professor Rossi had a question that has troubled scholars for centuries: why is the character Statius crowned with myrtle instead of laurel? Why ask? ''Epic poets were always crowned with laurel,'' he said.

The database told him that some commentators considered myrtle an allegory and some linked it to the bitterness of the plant.

Most of the commentaries are in Latin and Italian, with only two so far in English. The modern authors say the program is simple enough for high school students and can offer the arcane details that only a scholar could love.

Walter E. Stephens, a professor of French and Italian at Dartmouth, was eager to find out what other writers thought about Dante's use of the Latin word for ''torrent'' instead of Italian, in a line in Paradise. Only one commentator agreed with him that it was a reference to the fourth of Virgil's Georgic poems.

''Every time you read the Comedy you see that Dante wrote it with a sense of a reader looking over his shoulder,'' said Robert Hollander, a professor at Princeton University who envisioned the Dante project while teaching at Dartmouth in 1982. He said that the poem has more commentaries than the Bible.

The Dante project is just the type of thing that James O. Freedman, the president of Dartmouth, had in mind when he said in a speech last year that the school's main goal should be to enhance its intellectual distinction.

''People in our profession know that there is more to Dartmouth than football games and beer drinking and fraternities,'' said Professor Stephens. No Widespread Student Interest

Student interest in the Dante project is not widespread. The day it began, the undergraduate newspaper printed an article on it on page 7, reserving the front page for an article about confusion over the freshman meal plan.

''I think as more and more faculty become acquainted with it, it's going to become much more prominent in the lives of students,'' Mr. Freedman said in an interview.

The University of California at Irvine has a database of ancient Greek literature and the University of Chicago has one of French literature, overseen by the French Government. David Bantz, Dartmouth's director of computer programs in the humanities, said neither of those databases is as specific or accessible as the one here, which can be used by anyone in the world with a computer and modem.

The Dante project has received $500,000 in grants, the bulk coming from the National Endowment for Humanities.